A good blog post at the Nitro Marketing blog that puts things into perspective for people wondering how much effort they need to put into building an online business.

“100 hours of REAL work focused on one outcome will give you an online business making consistent income every day. “  Breaking that down, if you spend 10 hours a week, then that is 10 weeks… or a little under 3 months.

The followup rule is then:

“500 hours of REAL work focused on one outcome will give you an online business making a full-time income.” Breaking that down,  at 10 hours a week, that’s less than 1 year and you are at the full-time online level.

Whether it’s an affiliate business, your own product, or  a home-based business. Most opportunities seem to ask your commitment level, with 10 hours a week the suggestion.

Just in case you were wondering what kind of hours you need to spend, to build an income online.

Read the whole post at http://www.nitromarketing.com/blog/100-hours/

I’ve been revamping  Australian Flower Shops again lately.

I originally started the site back in late 2003, and it’s had 2 makeovers since.

It’s actually fun going on the Wayback Machine, to see how the layout and content has changed over the years. I’ve finally gone away from the green colour scheme that seemed to be a fallback for a few of my sites.

Surprisingly, there hasn’t been much change to the content. Back in 2003 I was teaching myself SEO, and the trend back then was hyphenated domain names and filenames and reciprocal link exchanges.  So I still have hyphenated domain and filenames – there’s no need to throw away the history, and if someone offered me a nice link that still remains, then I’ll keep it there, as you should.

And my keyword research back then showed that there was less competition for the long-tail phrases like “floral emblems of Australia“, than initial seaches like “flowers”.

It was easy to rank on Yahoo using hyphenated names, and I would get regular organic traffic from there and MSN. Google was always a hard nut to crack.

But despite the amount of time that I spend researching SEO and web development, with a normal job during the week, plus a couple of kids and dogs, I never really spent much time refining the site.

So recently I decided to try and vamp it up.

Being lazy, I bought Confession of a Lazy Internet Marketer, and was surprised to find that I was already doing 80% of the content and structure approach that he suggested.  Way back in 2003.

So as usual it comes down to SEO.  Some of his techniques I won’t use, in the link exchange area – I don’t feel like getting an ongoing paid membership to a linking site. But some of his other techniques for SEO are quite good. It’s interesting how they also overlap with some of the techniques used in 30 minute backlinks, which I also bought recently. So I will be using some of their techniques that they have in common. I think the 30 minute backlinks suggestions are easier for less technical people.

But I haven’t actually done any of their suggestions yet. I’m about halfway through preparing the groundwork.  So my Google rankings still need a lot of work.

And now I’m about to go out to a door shop, cos I really need to fix up the bottom room – it’s too crowded and dog oriented, and needs simplicity and lightening up.
Like a lot of websites I know.

One day the site will be finished. And then I can go on and revamp some more websites.

This post might get some interesting responses. It’s a response to “The Coffee House Letter”.

Google it. You’ll find lots of references,  all of which (at this point) are thinly veiled attempts to promote it, under the guise of “reviewing it”, using the web 2.0/social marketing techniques that everyone uses these days.

Well I’m not promoting it. It annoyed me enough to want to write a response.

Here it is….

It is a very well written letter – an excellent, very well-considered piece of copywriting.
It manipulates the emotions.
So you have to put aside the emotions and read between the lines.

They’ve gone for the shock approach upfront – “you’re in for a rude awakening about your current MLM”.

Their main premise is that the promise of MLM residual income is dead for the “average person”.
Well they admit they don’t want to deal with average people. They want people who are stars already.
So they aren’t helping average people become better.
They are making average people feel bad.

If you feel you might be an average marketer, that’s not a nice way to start the day.

(more…)

I already have SEOElite and KeywordElite, from Brad Callen.
My other splurge this year was upgrading to Pro member on SEOMoz.
And the final tool in my artillery was going to be a keyword spy tool. A costly monthly service.

But now Brad Callen has gone and created a free AdWords keyword spy tool that will let anyone spy on what keywords their competitors are advertising with!

PPC Web Spy lets you see other keywords and ads used by your competitors.

Let’s say you are searching for “dog training”.
When you install this PPC spy tool into your (Firefox) browser, it creates a button under each ad.
Click the button and you can see the other keywords this person is also advertising for.
PLUS THE AVERAGE POSITION, COST PER CLICK, CLICKS PER DAY AND COST PER DAY!

This is absolutely priceless information. From a free tool!

One of the few times I really need to use upper case exclamation marks in my blog. It’s that good.

If you advertise on Google AdWords, you really need this tool.

PPC Web Spy

Another winner from Brad Callen.

How I wish they were accessible to anonymous users!

I shouldn’t, but I take pride in the fact that for each of the five sites I’ve built with Drupal so far, I haven’t had to do any code hacks. The sites have been pure Drupal Core, plus common add-on modules. And the obvious CSS styling. I still haven’t had to learn how to use hooks.

And it’s really nice that it’s so easy to turn Drupal sites into membership sites. Built-in user management. Just turn on Contact Forms, and enable for each user, a personal contact form.

The problem is that the personal member contact forms are only accessible to other logged in members. Anonymous browsers get an “access denied” page.

There are heaps of people on the Drupal forums who want this. But the standard answer is “it’s by design”.

There are threads with detailed code hacks and patches. And I just don’t have time to do them. All I want (and many others want) is the ability to allow members on a site to be contacted without showing their email address in the clear. Just asking to be harvested by spammers.

So on my latest site A Healthy Business I wanted members to have their own pages with contact forms. Experimented with several options. And came back, semi-reluctantly, to using iContact signup forms.

They look handsome. And I know I should be using an autoresponder anyway, to be efficient, which is available through iContact.

I was just a little hesitant. I found iContact a little non-intuitive to setup. To get the effect I wanted on my personal page, with an embedded contact page, I had to setup a List on iContact. Then the autoresponder. Then the campaign. Then the signup form. Create the thank you page on my site (optional, but preferable). It really shouldn’t take that many steps. And I did want to have extra custom fields on my form, but I couldn’t see where to do that.

It should be easier.